Salmon croquettes, Mother’s day menu & cupcakes

I haven’t done too much cooking lately. I got hit with some nasty bronchitis that put me out for over a week, and while I felt like cooking… well, when you’re coughing all over the food nobody wants to eat it. I had a lot of tea and hot & sour soup last week.

When I did feel better the cupcakes came OUT. I baked three batches of cupcakes in the past few days. The first was an altered version of the Lower-Fat Chocolate Bundt Cake from Veganomicon, which I spiced up with some cinnamon and cayenne pepper for a Cinco de Mayo potluck. All the drunk people loved ’em! I tried to recreate it totally grain-free for mother’s day but the testers came out a little… gummy. Too much tapioca flour, and I think the date sugar I used soaked up all the liquid. I just threw a little extra almond meal in there and put the batter in the freezer for future (very fudgy) brownies. I don’t think Epic will get sick of chocolate anytime soon so he’ll get put through a lot of test batches while I master that recipe. I NEED to because it is so, so dense and dark and rich in its chocolate-ness.

I did get it together to make this lovely spread for Mother’s day:

left to right: salad, cupcakes and salmon croquettes

The lettuce/purple cabbage/carrot salad with raw garlicky-tahini herbed dressing is from the Summer 2010 issue of Purely Delicious Magazine, and with a squirt of agave the dressing went from bitter to great. I’m not sure why I buy that magazine — the articles are fucking terrible and I don’t end up making most of the recipes. It’s not like my subscription to Bon Apetit, which is inspiring but mostly food porn.

Next up are the cupcakes. When my initial batch of grain-free chocolate got too fudgy (usually never a problem) I decided to make the Strawberry Cupcakes from Elana’s Pantry. I used duck eggs instead of chicken, doubled the amount of strawberries and used 1/3 c honey instead of 1/2 c agave. Whoah! These are sweet. Moist, delicious, and definitely a lot more like a conventional cupcake in terms of sweetness than what I’m used to baking. Topped with almond butter frosting (almond butter, cow butter, agave and vanilla) and a slice of strawberry… oh wow, sugar bomb. Totally worth it. Totally making them again.

The protein to go with our salad is little salmon croquettes with lemon-mayonnaise dip. I’ve had the Salmon Korokke from Mummy, I Can Cook! bookmarked for a while. Canned Alaskan salmon is always available at my love Grocery Outlet, so I made a gluten-free, egg-free tester batch for dinner last week. They were really delicious and, uh, really gummy. I added too much tapioca flour again. This time around they were perfect!

Mini Salmon Croquettes

Egg-free, gluten-free and dairy-free. Makes about 15. Good for an appetizer.

• 1 15 oz can of salmon
• 3 T pickle juice
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 4-5 cloves of garlic diced real fine
• 2 T mustard
• juice from 1/2 a lemon
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 t pepper
• 1/4 c tapioca flour
• breadcrumbs of choice — I used Ener-G’s gluten free breadcrumbs, but in the future I’ll probably just use almond meal to keep it grain free.

Drain your can of salmon into a little bowl and give this water/fish juice to your cat. He will love you forever.

Place everything except the breadcrumbs into a bowl and stir until it’s all well mixed. Place about 3/4 c of breadcrumbs into a smaller bowl.  Scoop out little balls of mixture about 2T big, form them into balls and then roll in the breadcrumbs. I flattened my balls (ha! Ha… yeah.) so that they would cook faster. In a lightly oiled pan (just enough to make sure nothing sticks), cook 4-5 little patties at a time on medium, flipping at some point, until each side turns a dark gold. It takes a little while to cook them — about 15 minutes for the whole batch — but they’re otherwise quite easy and very, very tasty.